FOREST GROVE -- The morning we gather to slaughter a buffalo starts calm and sunny, and we take a few minutes for introductions.

Among us is an accountant who ferments his own beer, a technology director looking to hunt bigger animals and a vegan.

Our instructor tells us that this day is about taking responsibility for our food. Then he tells us someone will shoot an 800-pound buffalo, and we are welcome to watch.

We huddle by the pen -- bang!

A man with outstretched arms has shot the buffalo. The animal jumps slightly, turns, but doesn't fall. Our startled group is silent. The rancher prods the buffalo with a broomstick, nudging him to turn back.

Bang! Bang!

The buffalo's chest heaves, his skull drips blood, but he still stands.

Our hearts race. We plug our ears, we close our eyes. Some continue to watch, some wander away then return. Bang! Bang! The bullets keep coming. The man with the gun rests his head against the wooden pen, his eyes plaintive. Someone else comes to take over, and his third shot blows off the buffalo's right horn. The animal drops, legs kicking.

This is what we signed up for: messy, ugly, real food.

TrackersNW began workshops on butchering and preserving a buffalo this year. This two-day class at L Bar T Bison Ranch on the last weekend of May is the third offering. TrackersNW teaches outdoor and wilderness skills: foraging and tracking, and fashioning tools, bows and boats.

Everyone brings curiosity and purpose to this class, but most have never killed anything bigger than a fish.

Stella Maris, 48: Here because it seems like the right thing to do. She will run the kitchen and cook buffalo for a ceremony based on Native American tradition. She hopes this class will help prepare her.

Richard Palmason, 40: Loves meat too much to be a vegetarian, but shops organic and vegan because it's easier on the environment and thinks this will be a fascinating experience.

Noah Sherman, 38: Was vegan -- even eating only raw foods -- until recently; now he's foraging, and he sees food everywhere when he hikes.

Brad Nymeyer, 32: Wants to start hunting and taking more responsibility for his food.

Hansford Hair, 38: Getting back into hunting, looking to move on to deer and elk.

Jason Hovatter Craban, 36: Instructor for TrackersNW, and the one to shoot the buffalo. "It truly takes a community to do this," he says before class. "I'm incredibly honored and excited to be giving death to the animal today."

Me, 25: I am a vegan for reasons of conscience and have not eaten meat in six years. I'm not opposed to killing animals for food, but I don't want to contribute to their mistreatment and suffering in much of the food industry if I can avoid it. Yet I miss the taste of meat. I've long thought I'd be fine with eating an animal treated humanely at a local farm. I see the workshop as a chance to meet an animal as grand as the buffalo and assess the whole thing straight-on. I think I just might eat this meat.

Andrew Pinger, class instructor, and Tony Deis, TrackersNW founder, check in with the group after the shooting. A killing that had taken two quick shots in previous classes lasted more than 10 minutes here and required eight shots.

"There will never be anything beautiful about it," Deis says. "At this point it's dead; now it's up to us to use every part of that animal, as much as we possibly can."

We slit open the belly with obsidian flakes and knives that Pinger and his brother Michael made. Pinger says he finds the obsidian more effective than metal at times.

The hide is carpety, and I am surprised at my disgust when I slide my hand inside to peel off the hide. The intestines and stomach are encased in a white sack called fascia. We cut it open, spilling out the shivering guts.

Hansford Hair goes to work on cutting out the intestines -- future sausage casings. Forearms disappear into the gut. The bladder, a pretty pink balloon, will make a great pouch.

"Like wrestling with Jell-O," says Hansford Hair, the student who wants to do more hunting, as we work up a sweat.

The shed fills with the stench of guts. The buffalo's almost-football-sized heart hangs in its chest, and I am handed an obsidian knife to cut it out. After trying to keep some distance between the buffalo cavity and my clothes, I lean against the body and saw through tissue. When I hoist that prize out of the animal, everyone cheers.

Out come the liver, heart and kidneys -- onto tables for scrapple and sausages. The lungs and four stomach chambers (the buffalo is a ruminant) go into a gut pile destined for the garbage.

One of the stomachs flipped inside out reveals geodesic patterns, like gastrological coral.

"Isn't that insanely beautiful?" Hovatter Craban says.

Our instructor, Pinger, 34, is a clean-cut, outdoorsy biology student from Washington, D.C., who doesn't shy away from eating roadkill. To him, the focus of Trackers is learning to be self-sufficient and to thrive as people long did with shared common skills.

It's slower and harder, Pinger says, but it's meaningful.

By way of induction, Pinger reads a passage from "American Buffalo," in which author Steven Rinella hunts and kills a buffalo:

"How can someone suggest that paying for the slaughter of animals is more justifiable than taking the responsibility for one's food into one's own hands? . ... Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegation of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd."

"So, here's to looking a little odd today," Pinger says.

In "The Omnivore's Dilemma," journalist Michael Pollan illuminated the waste and industrialization of our food system today -- even for organic food. He rode a rising tide of rebellion against a food-supply system held so far from our eyes and hearts that we no longer really know what we are eating and, hence, what we are made of. We discard the fundamentals of what it takes to live, some even finding it a waste of time to cook for themselves.

But the idea of taking ownership of our food and knowing where it's come from has gone from being viewed as irrational to being seen as enlightened in a world where reports of contaminated food are common. Growing your own vegetables is up, as is raising chickens and purchasing directly from farmers.

In "Omnivore's" Pollan describes a meal he has killed and prepared almost fully on his own:

"... I knew the true cost of this food, the precise sacrifice of time and energy and life it had entailed. ... It's impossible to prepare and eat a meal quite so physically, intellectually, and emotionally costly without thinking about the incalculably larger debts we incur when we eat industrially -- which is to say, when we eat without a thought to what we're doing."

It takes hours, but the hide finally falls off the buffalo with a puff of dust.

When we break for lunch, people pull out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, doughnuts, cherries and salads -- no meat. Noah Sherman, the former vegan and raw foodie, reflects on the morning: "It feels kind of grave. It just feels like, the larger the animal ... you should take it more seriously." He thinks he'll be eating less meat.

Our afternoon work is to dismember the buffalo and package its muscle in butcher paper. With a cut and a twist, the shoulder falls easily. The rib cage splits apart like jigsaw pieces. We hang buffalo legs on rope from the shed's balcony, and Stella Maris takes one to task for more than an hour.

The knee separates to reveal a perfectly white, smooth cap. "What a miracle," Maris says. "That has never seen the light of day."

Two weeks later, she will cook buffalo in a Naraya ceremony for gay, transsexual and "two-spirit" people, of different sexual orientations. Native American elders will partake, too, dancing and singing in a circle, each honoring one another.

As Maris labors, she observes how the muscle wraps the leg and the joints hug together. "I feel really close to this leg," she half-jokes. "We've been through a lot together."

Why a buffalo?

"There's also kind of a mystique about the animal," Pinger says. "The history of that animal in this country is really pretty crazy."

It's a history I don't remember being taught. Buffalo long thrived tens of millions strong, serving as tribes' primary food and resource. But in the 19th century, buffalo were hunted to near-extinction for their hides or just for sport -- left behind to rot and to deprive Native people of their food.

Yet we've put them on the backs of coins and revere them as icons of the Wild West.

Today, about 90percent of the 225,000 buffalo in the U.S. are raised by private ranchers, according to the National Bison Association. The U.S. Department of Agriculture counts 1,200 buffalo on private lands in Oregon.

At L Bar T Bison Ranch, the demand from people seeking to know their food and eat more healthfully is picking up enough that owners Tom and Lori Epler have discontinued their wholesale business to supply individuals. Fewer than 20 buffalo wander the fenced pastures at L Bar T in Forest Grove, and a couple dozen others are at a more spacious sister ranch in Nyssa, in eastern Oregon.

In places at the L Bar T, the buffalo have stomped the ground into a mixture of mud and feces, and they stand ankle deep in it, staring back at us.

Tom Epler says he loves buffalo. If he could, he says he'd buy a hundred acres for them and sit watching them all day.

These animals can be almost personable, and the Eplers get attached. They've had Buffy the mother cow for 18 years, but she's become a money-loser. But when Epler brings that up with his wife, "she just gives me that stare: 'Don't touch her.'"

When the Eplers' kids were young, the buffalo would know when to wander up to the bathroom window to watch them brush their teeth at night. But buffalo are wild. Epler wouldn't dare approach a mother giving birth, even if she's having difficulty and the calf will die.

At the Eplers' ranches, the animals stay out in pasture but are brought into confinement 30 days before slaughter to be fattened up on grains. He admits it's not ideal.

"Yeah, there is some boredom with it. We try to, you know, we throw a tire out there for them to play with. They like to play.

"But (the buffalo) has a purpose, to provide us with sustenance." By fulfilling that purpose, he says, ranchers keep the species going.

After almost everyone has packed up and left, a few of us look back into the stall where the buffalo died. The ground is stained red.

The conversation about this day will always turn back to the difficult killing.

"That was definitely the worst part of the day," class member Richard Palmason says. "How many minutes did the buffalo suffer?"

The next day starts at instructor Jason Hovatter Craban's house in North Portland to corn the meat, dry jerky, strip threads from sinew, render fat for pemmican (the original power bar), slow-cook hide pieces for glue, saw and roast bones for marrow, pound out scrapple (a breakfast dish), hang and scrape the hide, grill the ribs and hose out the intestines for sausage casings. It's a long day.

None of the students has tasted this buffalo yet. The experience -- and the whiff of the guts -- lingers on our hands and the backs of our throats.

In the kitchen, Hovatter Craban admires the rough, gray, footlong tongue; the liver fills the sink. A tripod of bamboo poles hang strips for jerky over a smoldering fire.

Brad Nymeyer pounds a long tendon with a wooden mallet, split log and two large rocks. We strip the stiff sinew into thin, fluffy strings. Pinger shows how to twist corded rope and chews on a strand to wrap an arrowhead onto a shaft.

The conditions are far from sterile -- mashing the meat in a carpeted living room, sawing bones on a kids' picnic table, flies everywhere. Pinger figures he could be more careful, but this is how it all used to be done, and "we know where this meat's been since it was on the animal."

It looks mouthwatering, too.

Andrew Kobierski has joined the class on Day 2 and hoses out the intestines, skills he plans to put to use. "I plan on never having to use a grocery store. I kinda hope grocery stores don't even exist."

Noah Sherman gnaws eagerly on a rib as wide as his chest. "It actually tastes really good. It does taste like wild-flavored tasty beef."

The reviews are rave. Does it taste better for the experience? Mmm, not really, is the collective reply.

I struggled almost to the end about whether to eat the buffalo, as the appetizing aromas grew stronger, but by dinnertime, I still feel it's better -- for the animals and the environment -- to be vegan. My plate holds salad and bread.

Our instructor throws a section of rib cage -- most of its meat picked off -- into the backyard coop for the chickens' eager feasting.

As I leave, a neighbor is pulling up in her minivan next to a racked buffalo hide spotted with meat and flies. She complained earlier in the day, but this time, she stomps away, her gaze averted.

A couple weeks later, some of those who took the class say they appreciate meat more and want to try hunting.

But at the ceremony Stella Maris attended, the buffalo's presence has humbled her. She cried for the buffalo's pain and all the animals she's eaten thoughtlessly. She's giving up meat for a while.

Noah Sherman says he wished the class had been more ceremonial, taking time to learn about this buffalo and give thanks to it in a collective way. Sherman ate all the buffalo he had -- raw -- and said it was delicious.

Jason Hovatter Craban, who grew up hunting, now realizes how removed he was from those deaths by shooting from a distance. This killing -- looking such a large animal in the eyes -- haunted him. (TrackersNW says it will turn the shooting over to the rancher next time.) He is now reminded not to take killing for granted.

And I -- someone who's never had a pet or really ever known an animal -- know I have much to learn about living and dying before understanding about the way I eat.